Liam Neeson’s Wolfpunch: The Motion Picture came out last weekend. The ad campaign is really pushing the fact that this is a film about a bunch of dudes stranded in the wintry woods and pursued by wolves, largely because I imagine a campaign to sell it as a movie about the failures of airplane engineering was a non-starter.
However, in a group interview with Movieline, Dermot Mulroney reminds us all not to forget that the heart of this film is the man on man on man on man on man action that cinema so desperately needs:
Dermot Mulroney: “I loved Jaws and Aliens and…Deliverance. So to me it read like those, I thought I’d like to be in a movie like that once, that’d be amazing. I’ve made a lot of movies that had both men and women in them, a lot of movies that were dominated by the woman’s storyline. And in this case it was a very different experience making the movie and enjoying the movie, when it was completed, because of the fact that there are no women in it… It was like thank God, I get to do a movie with just guys.”
Let’s get it out of the way that anyone referring to “actor” Dermot Mulroney needs to include those air quotes, so for him this quote stops, for all intents and purposes, at “thank God, I get to do a movie.”
Let’s also get it out of the way that Deliverance is a very…interesting film to reference in the context of two other films in which non-human monsters literally rip people to shreds.
Let’s also also get it out of the way that Aliens is, in fact, a movie about a woman who teams up with a small squad of Marines that includes two women to investigate an alien-riddled colony of which the only survivor is a young woman, and then proceeds to nearly-singlehandedly torch alien ass into oblivion.
I can’t help but picture Dermot Mulroney, sitting in the house that playing second fiddle to a bunch of vaginas all the time has bought him, wrinkling his nose and holding up scripts with two fingers as he deposits them carefully in a box labeled STORIES ABOUT WOMEN and a frowny face on them. He’s tired of it, don’t you see? He’s had to be billed under Sigourney Weaver, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Emily Watson, Emily Mortimer, and Glenn Close, and he BARELY edged out Anne Bancroft and Alfre Woodard that one time, and just a bunch of other bitches, all right? God, why is Hollywood so deluged with stories about women? Everywhere you look it’s just thoughtful, respectful, non-objectifying stories about the deep conflicts of women in a variety of situations that are never sidelined or belittled as being domestic or romantic, and Dermot Mulroney is TIRED OF IT. “Why can’t there be a movie about MEN, and THEIR concerns!”, Dermot cries, checking his junk casually just to get a look at some man-stuff before the day is over. When will Hollywood realize that men could be bankable, too, if only someone would give them a chance? Why won’t they give men leading roles? Why won’t these boardrooms packed full of women making all the key financial and business decisions that dictate the market and its gender attitudes finally stop asking for him to talk to women already? WHY?
No, seriously though, why.
